Cardiff, Janet and Miller, George Bures. “Alter Bahnhof Video Walk.” City of Kassel train station in Canada. Uploaded in 2012. YouTube video, 8:27. (Online Video)Marina Peterson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas – Austin. Her interests as an ethnographer are the relationships between sound, sensory experience, and the urban land and soundscapes.
Janet Cardiff is a sound installation artist who creates audio walks and brought the medium to the forefront of the art world in 1995. Both creators challenge “viewers” to see sound through the senses that experience the provocations their work elicits. The works are created for these viewers.
In the introduction to Atmospheric Noise: The Indefinite Urbanism of Los Angeles, Marina Peterson states her intention to explore the concepts of noise pollution, and deeper, noise, in all of the facets that it touches. A sound impacts the body with a different kind of permanence than other senses. “…sensory perception figures a body as being part of a world of atmospheric qualities rather than separable from it” (p. 10). Both Peterson and Cardiff provoke a question about time in their work; Peterson addresses this by writing in the present tense and Cardiff records geo-specific binaural sounds to be listened to by “viewers” in a different time in the same space. What is the relationship of sound and time? What is the experience of hearing and being heard? Who are the noisemakers? Peterson points out that noise pollution makes a noise maker anonymous and while Cardiff’s work is more curated and claimed through sound manipulation, much of the audio has an anonymous quality to it. These works, through their obvious relationship to audio walks, have a significant bearing on our project because we are working to create audio walks of carceral geography in El Paso. The approaches, particularly of Cardiff, show how the space and information can speak for itself and nuance can be offered with soundscapes.
Tracing noise, for Marina Peterson, “means attending not only to how and in what terms noise is produced as such but also what is externalized and how they also matter; these are the excesses, the logics and illogics of categories as they are taken up in various contexts. It means attending to how that which is blocked, excluded, and occluded nonetheless percolates, escapes, seeps out the edges, explodes, implodes, expands into and out of gaps that take the form of doubt, noise complaints, love of home, weather, wind, fog, vibration, touch” (p. 8).
More on the Alter Bahnhof Video Walk: “Here is an attempt to document our 2nd piece made for dOCUMENTA. Viewers are given an ipod and headphones and asked to follow the prerecorded video through the old train station in Kassel. The overlapping realities lead to a strange, perceptive confusion in the viewers brain. Hard to document and harder to explain. We only present the recorded audio here, but when doing the walk the real sounds mix with the recorded adding another level of confusion as to what is real and what is fiction. Wear headphones to get the full effect of the original binaural recording. This is a 6 minute clip of a 26 minute piece. Credits for the entire piece follow” (Janet Cardiff).
Atmospheric Noise by 